Friday, October 31, 2008

A Sight For Sore Muscles

A rather unusual result from the Korean Constitutional Court has been delivered recently. The court has upheld a law that only allows people who are blind to be a licensed masseur.

This is rather unfair to all the sighted people who want to be masseurs, and there are about 200,000 of them while there are only around 7,100 licensed masseurs. A sighted person working as a masseur can face fines and prison (although I'm sure they avoid most such problems like the street food stands do. A few quite payments to the local police and a brief holiday during crackdown week (I've ranted previously about corruption here and my involvement thereof)).

While I can agree with the court for wanting to make sure that blind people have the ability to earn a living for themselves, I don't believe the way to do this is to give them a monopoly on an industry, especially one where there is sufficient demand for almost thirty times the number of practitioners. The way to do it is to ensure that blind people are able to enter any profession that they are capable of performing (I don't think it's wrong to not hire a blind person as a photographer for example) and that there is a sufficient set of social services available to support them as they do so.

End PostWriting time: 15 minutes (this one had a few paragraphs rewritten)Time since last post: about an hourCurrent media: still none